I’m doing an insanely long drive today, but it gives you time to think. If you can’t get some serious, solitary thinking done between Austin and El Paso, then your brain stem probably isn’t functioning. As the song goes, there are miles and miles (and more miles) of Texas…
I always like to listen to regional music as I’m passing through a particular region. On this stretch of highway, I’ve been playing lots of Buddy Holly and the Bobby Fuller Four. It sounds really good out here in West Texas, where their music came from. It just feels right. That may be a simplistic statement, but I will follow with a complex one:
I’ve been to a lot of places and played music. I’ve also been to a lot of places and watched other musicians performing. And of course, as a constantly learning student of musical history, I’ve heard a lot of music that was recorded in these different regions. I have formed a few opinions along the way.
It’s difficult to put your finger on exactly why this is, but music just sounds better and is played better in certain areas of the United States. (I’ll keep this discussion to the US, but I’m sure that this applies in all parts of the world.)
Temperature and humidity may be a factor. Altitude may be a factor. It could just be the general environmental vibe, or even the availability of like-minded musicians in a particular area. I don’t know. I definitely think that altitude and humidity play a big part in how recorded sound works. I remember having a conversation with producer Mark Neill about this, many years ago. I won’t name any locations, but we talked about how certain cities in the US have produced no exceptional recordings. Mark was convinced that some combination of humidity and altitude and temperature affected everything in the studio, from the way the diaphragms inside the microphones worked, to the decay of a plate reverb, to the way the music was printed onto analog recording tape. I believe him. Like a lot of things Mark says, it sounds kinds of nutty at first, but eventually you understand that he knows what he’s talking about.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that certain places just seem to live and breathe music. An obvious example would be New Orleans. The hot, muggy, tropical feel of the place inspires a certain type of music: jazz, Dixieland, ragtime, et cetera. When you walk those streets at night and hear that music wafting through the air from a live band playing in a club, it just feels right. That’s the proper way to listen to that music, with sweat pouring down your face.
This doesn’t apply just to music, either. Paris is famous for visual art, and there’s good reason for that. There is something about the refraction of light and the shadows and the resulting colors there that is unique. Everything looks like a painting. Naturally, art flourishes for the same reasons: there is something in the air, and a gathering of like-minded individuals.
There are lots of other places in the US that have produced an insane amount of great music. New York has inspired countless styles and genres, from crooners like Sinatra to punks like the Ramones, rock ’n’ roll weirdos like Lou Reed, or even the classic old-school rap music by people like Grandmaster Flash and the Beastie Boys. When you’re in New York, and you hear that music, it just hits right. You can feel it bouncing in the canyons between the skyscrapers, and you can absorb the energy from the street.
Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, Nashville—every single one of these places just had something in the water, or something in the air, that you can’t define, that made great music happen there. Recordings made in these places sound magical as well. I could write ten pages about each one of these cities and the incredible music that they have produced.
Texas is so big, so vast, it’s more like a country than a state. But the amount of incredible music that has come from Texas over the years is still staggering. Western swing, blues, dancehall honky-tonk country music, mind blowing rock ’n’ roll, punk rock, psychedelia, all manner of different Spanish-language genres—there is so much great stuff that has come from the state of Texas, you could write a hundred books about it. It’s hard to wrap your head around the amount of musical history. It’s as vast as the state itself.
The records that came out of Texas sound amazing. There were great recording studios all over the place: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Lubbock. Clovis, New Mexico, where Norman Petty had his studio, mostly recording Texas artists. All of them cut huge national hits that still get played on the radio multiple times a day, every day. Texas has created music that is loved around the world.
It’s just a very musical place down here. It’s in the air. And when you get a bunch of great musicians in a place where they can work and make money, and you have all these other environmental aspects all coming together in just the right way, well, it’s a bit magical. And perhaps most importantly, they know this and they cultivate it. Texans know they have something culturally very special, and good musicians are treated almost like royalty. It’s a special place.
There just seems to be music coming out of every pore down here. As I am cranking some great West Texas rock ’n’ roll on my drive today, played by Buddy Holly and the Bobby Fuller Four, everything about it just feels right. It flows, like water. The energy is right.
This is meant to be a positive post, about greatness in music that makes people happy. But I have been in other places where you try to play live music, and everything just feels dead and empty and cold. Music just doesn’t have the same energy. This is where it gets a bit metaphysical, but certain places are just conducive to music, and some aren’t. Probably many people can’t hear it, and it wouldn’t make any difference to them. But I can hear it. I can tell. And I like being in these places where music is in the air, where it flows freely, where blood and sweat mix with the dirt and the grass and something special and truly unexplainable happens.
This has been a lengthy diatribe. If you got this far, do yourself a favor and play some Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Buddy Holly, Flaco Jimenez, Doug Sahm, Cindy Walker, the 13th Floor Elevators, Freddy Fender, Lavelle White, or any of a thousand other great Texas artists from the past hundred years to the present. If you can’t listen to that music and feel something, you might be missing a brain stem, as well as ears.
